Tuesday, October 30. 2012

Leveraging the Content-Based Read Cache in VMware vSphere 5.1 within VMware View 5.1. The goal of this paper is to provide a thorough understanding of how the content-based read cache (CBRC) functions with vSphere 5.1, and how it is integrated in VMware View 5.1. It will also provide a detailed explanation of configuring View Storage Accelerator (also known as Host Caching) for View desktops.

VDI deployments can scale up by increasing back-end computing power and by adding storage space for desktop consolidation. Storage space preserves virtual machine images, which load to the host memory to make the desktops live. A typical performance bottleneck is the I/O request issued from a virtual machine to the underlying storage for accessing the data contents from virtual machine images. View Storage Accelerator included in VMware View 5.1 addresses the bottleneck by leveraging the CBRC feature in vSphere.

Though CBRC is a vSphere feature, it is uniquely leveraged by VMware View to provide the Host Caching capability. The CBRC feature provides a per-host RAM-based solution for View desktops. This considerably reduces the read

I/O requests that are issued to the storage layer, and also addresses boot storm snags. Studies show that View Storage accelerator helps to minimize the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in VMware View deployments by providing up to 80 percent reduction in peak IOPS and up to 65 percent reduction in peak throughput. Refer to the VMware End-User Computing Blog for more details.